It charted how a small midlands firm went from making underwear for nuns to becoming the most successful kit maker the then football world had ever seen.

Paul Crompton, the Executive Producer behind the programme for Fox Films, exclusively told the Sun on Sunday: “The response we have received to the programme has been fantastic.

There were, however, a small minority who were very angry at the archive footage we got from another earlier documentary called TV Eye, which showed a government advisor visiting the Admiral workplace in the 1970s as it was facing closure.

“They were unhappy at how this documentary footage - not ours - depicted the women.”

One line of inquiry is whether the fire was linked to the programme screened last week on the history of Admiral

The admiral factory, or underwear firm Cook & Hurst as it then was, mainly employed a workforce of highly skilled women, and the company took great pride in employing several generations of the same families.

Bert Patrick, now 82, was the creative genius behind it all.

He said: “Young girls would stand at the side of the machines learning from their mothers and their grandmothers. We were at all times a family business, which was why I couldn't bring myself to close it, make everyone redundant, and set up in the Far East like Admiral”s rivals, as I was encouraged to do.

DOUBLE WRECKER

Bert said: “Jobs were easy to come by and we wanted to keep and reward our staff. The idea of incentives came from me but what they were and what they constituted came from the feedback from the female
workforce.”

Although it eventually went out of business, forced out by the willingness of rivals such as Nike and Adidas to use cheap foreign labour in China and the Far East, the Admiral Factory itself was

subject to a preservation order.

Bert said the joke doing the rounds was perhaps a disgruntled Coventry City supporter.

The firm became the most successful kit maker the then football world had ever seen, producing kits for the England squad

The documentary revealed how Admiral had produced a chocolate brown kit for Coventry on the 1970s which was loathed by fans, particularly as it made it difficult to pick out their own players when the light
was fading.

Such is the mystique of Admiral, however, that the original hated chocolate kits are now a collector”s item, changing hands for £400-a-time.

Bert said: “The joke doing the rounds it is either a Coventry City fan who didn't like to be reminded of that kit in the documentary, or someone who thought they would go back and see if there were any left, given that they now apparently change hands for £400-a-go.”

It employed a workforce of highly skilled women, and the company took great pride in employing several generations of the same families

"When we opened other factories they didn't have the same sort of history.

“Some of the women you saw in the documentary would have been making underwear before, when it was Cook & Hurst, and they saw the changes when we created Admiral.

“We had three generations of the same families working there, so the mother would train the daughter and then the daughter her own daughter. It was a special place. They would be taught at the side of the machine how to sew a football garment together.